As I’ve already told you, in September I moved in Strasbourg for work. It was hard and thrilling at the same time and since my very first walk there, I’ve felt in love with the city. It’s small, but really characteristic. You walk in the city centre and you feel like you entered in a fairytale with the tipical alsacian houses, the river and the bridges. What I would like to do with you is creating a small guide, in different episodes, of the best I’ve tried here. Just in case you want to visit, which I hardly recommend.

Surprise, surprise: I’m here again. New day, new reportage from my small kitchen. If I’ve always dreamed of having a black table now I know that I don’t want it anymore. Let’s forget for a second that I’m an instagram maniac and that I love posting pictures of my food and dear lord Strasbourg is so foggy and grey and with a black table it’s impossible to take a good picture if you have no light, let’s forget it. The real thing is that it gets dirty in a second. You clean it, turn around, turn back, dirty again. After this experience I’ll forget that I wanted any black in my house, this for sure. But we’re here to talk about food and not furniture. What I’m cooking today is one of the most simple and at the same time more scenic recipes ever made. Everyone would think you’ve been working on it for ages, the real thing is that for most of the time you can take out your glass of wine, your book and wait while the things cook themselvs. This is artichokes’ magic, they make things look so pretty every time! It’s pretty healthy this time, just in case you can try to substitute the butter with olive oil, but even the butter is not that much!

I’ve been a ghost in the past six months, I know. I will tell you a secret: it’s practically impossibile to properly run a blog when you have a job that takes you 10 hours per day and you are also a student. Sad, sad story. This anyway, didn’t stopped me from taking pictures now and then of my new city, my outfits and, as you see today, my fancy food. I just had no time to look at them, to talk about them or write about them. But hey, today I’m here, I call it progress! This recipe that I will explain to you today was born from the passion that Alsacians (and me) have for scallops. Another thing that I can tell you is that you and your friends and family will get passionate about them too from the exact moment they will get out of the oven. This is what happened with my roommates (oh yes, did I told you that I have roommates now?); my fagottini never had the chance to see the light of the day, too bad for them, too good for us 😉 I would love to say that I can give you tips for the healthy version, but as you will see this is pretty fatty, the triumph of french cookery, so my advice to keep it healthy is to invite a lot of friends for an aperitif, serve this and you will have no time to eat more than two, they will disappear 😀

Like every year, here I am celebrating the birth of this little space of mine. And like every year I think back at the past year and well, lucky me it ended. It was probably the worst year of my life. In fact it was the year in which I forgot that I have a life, that I’m alive, I wasn’t interested anymore, I was just waiting to die. It was hars af, but I came out of that, I went living abroad all alone and I restarted from a new beginning. Speaking of which, we haven’t actually talk a lot since I moved, I will do a dedicated post soon, I promise, for now I’ll just let you know that probably I’m living the time of my life, and I’m so damn happy I took this decision! As you probably understood, this time I’m not superhappy to talk about my past year because it was full of darkness, the light came back just around september, so I’m just gonna leave here pictures from 2017 blog posts, thanking you for being the cutest followers and my friends (old and new!) and family for always being there for me, something easy to do when I’m happy and very difficult when the only thing I wanted to do was cry. Cheers to a better 2018 for all of us!!

I write this post while I’m surrounded by boxes, luggages, documents and so on and so forth. Yes, as I’ve told you some time ago I’m going to live alone! In Strasbourg to be precise (but if you follow me on Instagram you already know that), to write my dismission and so if you know places I can’t miss not only in the city, but all around Alsace let me know ;). Yesterday morning I’ve finished this session of exams and tonight it’s time to go! But I don’t want to bore you more with the story of my departure, I think I’ll tell you more on a dedicated post when I’ll be settled down, I have many things to tell you and advice to give you! But here we talk about din-dins and the good ones! I’ll be really honest with you, I’m not a big meat-eater, I do prefer fish, but I’m also pretty anemic so I have to eat it now and then, not always luscious like I’ll teach you to do today (actually mostly never, I’ll be sincere), but there’s no denaying it, this is all another story. If you’re looking for a recipe for your diet go read another post, the guinea-fowl, as we’re going to discover, needs to be cuddled a lot to be good and by cuddle I mean rolling it over in the fat. For this reason today I can’t give you an ‘healthy’ version like a I usually do. Right, that’s enough talk, let’s go on with the ingredients: a few, simple, economic, but if well combined make such an effect!!

Today I’m going to show you two products I’ve received lately. One is a cream the other a night-gown. At first sight they have not very much in common, but there’s a thing: you are supposed to use them at the same time of the day! We put night-gowns on in the morning, when we wake up and in the night before going to bed. Same things with Prodigy Reversis cream by Helena Rubinstein. It’s a skin global ageing antidote for your under-eye. Don’t look at me like that! Nearly 24 and already working on wrinkles? First of all it’s a anti-aging not a wrinkle cream. What?! You don’t see the difference? Very bad! Anti aging products don’t focus only on wrinkles like a wrinkle cream, but also on dehydratation, tonicity and marks. Starting to understand a bit more? I work in a pharmacy that is also a perfumery so I had the chance to follow courses made by the brands we sell (not gonna tell you which ones now, as we are talking about HR) where I’ve learned that if you really want to fight against aging you have to start cure your skin from your 20s. This is why I’ve decided to try this product. I keep my face skin hydratated everyday, but it’s under my eyes where I’m beginnig to see less tonicity and sometimes dehydratation too. So with products like Prodigy Reversis I can start fighting against my future wrinkles. It’s actually a little early to say if this will work, call me when I’m 40, but there’s a thing I can easily say: after I put that cream on I feel like my under-eye zone is extremely relaxed and that’s definitely what I’m looking for now!

For what concerne the night-gown: I’ve received it from Ilfashionup, an ebay shop that sells really fashionable things. I like it a lot, the color and the shape make me feel like a Victoria’s Secret angel 😉

A friend of mine, Brenda, some time ago sent me this drawing she saw on facebook, if anyone of you knows who’s the artist or where I can find the original one please tell me as I’d really like to post the original, not my cropped and instagrammed version and most of all credit him or her. Anyway she sent me this saying she was seeing me in it. And that’s exactly what I’ve thought too. But the funny thing is that she knows me just from the beginning of university but this paint remind me of middle school where I’ve played Saint Fina in the school play named by the Saint herself. I used to wear long hair, and by long I mean till half my thights. This and a natural beauty (I refused make up in any way possible even if my classmates use to wear it everyday) made me be chosen for that role. I resume you the story very quickly: Saint Fina was the most beautiful girl living in San Gimignano, Tuscany. One day she went taking some water at the well and a prince that was there to drink tell her ‘You’re really beautiful’. This made Fina feel really guilty so she went back and laid down on a table without drinking or eating till she died. When she passed away from the table, all over her body, down her window and all over the town everything became covered on pansies. Pretty sad right? Yes, I agree with you, but I remember clearly a couple of photo we made before the representation one was me with the prince (as my professors said: the hottest guy in school) and in the other one I was in the exact same position, dressed like a princess and with pansies all over me and my hair. This is why when I saw this I was really speachless. After the first emotion of being portraited by someone that I don’t even know, I recalled the story of Fina. After the representation I totally forgot it, but I don’t blame myself that much, we are all pretty stupid in middle school years. Fina decided to punish herself in front of God because she was beautiful. I don’t really think it’s a good example, forgive me Fina really. I’ve always been pretty sure that everyone of us is beautiful in its own special way, it only depends on us to find which are our strong points. Standards of beauty change every year and this already shows how actually are important in real life: less than nothing. Everyone of us in this world has his own marks and these are the ones that used in the right way can make us shine. We don’t have to be shy and most of all we don’t have to be scared to shine. Much more easy to say than do, right? I know it, I’m like you believe me. To explain what I say I’ll tell you a couple of things of my real life experience and I know there are situation that are really worse in the world, but believe me it’s always so frustrating. The first one is the constant fear I have when I go running. I usually go running in the countryside for a simple reason: I need to put my earphones really loud to have my best performance and in the city this would mean be in serious danger because of the cars that you can’t actually ear. Since countryside is not really far from my home I’ve found this compromise. But there I’m alone, but really alone. The only people I meet scary me so much, I can see how they look at me and the comments they make just because (like every normal girl doing sport) I wear a top and a pair of shorts. If it was just for the words and the looks I’ll be on the ‘who cares’ side, but honestly how do I know if it won’t become something more? I’m a girl, alone, in the middle of nowhere, do you think that someone could really ear me? Come and help me? Hell to the no. I don’t want to ask my dad or my best friend to come have a run with me beacuse I need to be with a male someone to feel safe. I was grown up as an indipendent woman and I’ll always be, I won’t let them win. But it’s also true that I’m never relaxed when I go running and this is really sad in 2017. Other thing is when I go out in the city by night. When I’m with boys I’m completely relaxed, but when me and my girls decide for a GNO and we park our cars distant we are all scared to reach the meeting point. So we wait till everyone of us has parked and then we all go out and call each other on the phone during all the walk so in any case of danger we do know it immediately. Again, 2017. If you’re asking me for a solution I don’t really have an answer. Many things come to my mind, like a compulsory self-defence class for all the women, but really do we want to answer to violence with other violence? I’m not really on that side even if sometimes I wish I knew some of those moves. I think it would be really better a new type of education based on respect. I do respect the other women, but also I do respect men. I’m not generalizing, I know many respectuful boys and men, but I can’t deny that there are also ones that still look at as women as object. Also the more we are ‘beautiful’ or better said self-confident the more we are seen in the worst way. Maybe starting to teach the importance of equality since very early years could make the real difference. This is surely what I’ll do with my children when I’ll be a mommy. I cannot imagine a world where my daughters have to be scared to go out alone or my sons will be disrespectful. So I think back at Fina, maybe the comment of the Prince was like a violence to her and she felt really guilty for it, as much as she decided to die. No Fina, we have to fight, not to die, we are beautiful creatures in any way possible and we’ll never ever be ashamed of it.

A couple of photos taken by mom. I’ve always thought that behind every portrait there’s a special way the photographer sees his or her model. It’s unique how a mommy see her little girl, as I’ll always be for her. One day I’ll be the mommy of someone and I’ll take my camera and shoot his or her portrait and it will be super special, because it will be full of my love. This is what I see in my mother’s ones. Even if we have many fights, even if we don’t see each other so much, there’ll always be something so very magical that connects us.

Here it is my favorite column 😉 It all started yesterday night, while I was very bored at home as a storm blocked me from going out and I was scrolling down my facebook dashboard. I saw those hair and I stared at the photo for a few minutes thinking about the fact that a few days ago I’ve said to myself ‘we’re done with blonde, no way we are gonna be back to blonde in our life’. And then a photo changes everything, my hairdresser is going to hate me, believe me!